


this room and everything in it

by rime



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: College, M/M, Mutual Pining, Pining, Poetry, self-indulgence of the highest degree
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-23
Updated: 2019-09-23
Packaged: 2020-10-26 14:24:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20743679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rime/pseuds/rime
Summary: Sylvain is Felix’s best friend and modern poetry TA; Felix doesn’t give a shit about poetry, but one way or another, Sylvain’s gonna make him.[or, felix n sylvain read Gay Poems and felix thinks Gay Thoughts]





	this room and everything in it

**Author's Note:**

> music rec: yo la tengo - [you can have it all](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsQW7jZJY9s)

“Yesterday’s assignment,” Sylvain said patiently, “was to discuss this poem at recitation, and bring your own to discuss, yeah? And I’m pretty sure you haven’t done either, Felix.

“So, part one. Let’s go line by line, okay? _A narrow Fellow in the Grass / Occasionally rides._” 

“Snakes don’t _ ride,_” said Felix. Sylvain ignored him. 

_ “...Have passed I thought a Whip Lash / Unbraiding in the Sun / When stooping to secure it It wrinkled / And was gone. _ Come _ on_, Felix, you’ve gotta enjoy that description!” 

“Hm,” said Felix. It was unconventional. He supposed he could see the appeal. It was strongly accentuated by Sylvain’s genuine enthusiasm for his subject, the way he gesticulated wildly in an attempt to convey _ snake riding, slipping, wrinkling in the sun. _

If Felix had written this, he would have written _ snakes can kill _ and been done with it_. _

“You wanna read the ending?” Sylvain asked. “Out loud, I mean.” 

“Not particularly.”

“Feliiiiix.” 

“All _ right_,” he said, hoping he sounded displeased. 

_Several of Nature’s People_  
_I know, and they know me_  
_I feel for them a transport_  
_Of Cordiality _

_But never met this Fellow_  
_ Attended or alone_  
_ Without a tighter Breathing  
And Zero at the Bone._

“Zero... at the bone,” he said again, turning each word over, even as Sylvain lit up at the sound. 

“Yesss, I _ knew _ you’d like that part, Felix! Isn’t it wonderful? Dazzlingly inventive -- hard to believe Dickinson was the Bernie of her times, yeah? Though I guess Bernadetta’s no slouch at writing, either. So maybe it’s not _ that _weird...” 

“I don’t like it,” said Felix, thinking through it._ Zero at the bone, _huh? No, he wouldn’t say he liked it. But it did transfix him in some way.

“Sure you don’t. You do… get it, right? I mean, I know you do. But just to be sure?” 

_Glenn,_ he thought. _Fear._ “Death,” he said. “I’m leaving now.” 

Sylvain caught him with an arm and forced him back into his seat. He threw up his hands. “Whoa there. Dude, how do you have no time for this? It’s not like the professor is assigning you term papers -- she’s going easy on you, really. You’re so disinterested it’s mystifying. I mean, you’re so into proper training, I’m surprised none of it transfers over to poetry.” 

“Poetry is useless,” said Felix.

“You have zero tact. At the bone, very possibly.” 

Felix kicked him in the shin. 

“And it is _ not_,” said Sylvain crossly. “I mean, ever read a girl a few lines of Dante? Pretty effective.” Felix gave him a withering look. “It’s a _ joke_, Felix! Girls don’t read Dante. No one does.” 

“I don’t like it,” he said, sullen. Abstraction had no place on the battlefield. 

“Of course you don’t,” Sylvain shot back. “Ever heard of Marianne Moore? She didn’t either.”

“Show-off,” said Felix, and Sylvain looked at him and sighed. 

“So we finished the Dickinson. We’re almost done here, okay? Read something for me, Felix,” he said, and Felix’s heart stuttered in his chest even as he cast about for some dumb reason why he wouldn’t. “It’s better homework than last week’s -- I know how much you hated that.” 

“An Irish Foreman Foresees His Death,” Felix said, remembering with distaste. You didn’t need to take modern poetry to understand that one. Dying was pointless. Always had been. 

Sylvain whistled. “You even remember the title. Look, I know you wish this were AP Sword or whatever, but right now you just have to read _ one poem _ and talk to me about it,” he said, as if explaining to a particularly inattentive child. “_Then _ you can get back to studying the blade, or whatever you’re so eager to do.” 

“That’s… not a class,” said Felix.

“You know what I mean! Find a poem you like and we’ll talk about it. I’ll help.” He tossed Felix a ratty green paperback that threatened to collapse on impact. Some sort of anthology, huh. With wear and tear like this, it was probably stuffed unceremoniously in and out of satchels, read every day… 

“Is this your copy?” he asked. 

“Is that a problem?” said Sylvain. Felix didn’t respond, just flipped through the dog-eared volume until he came across its most shredded, tattered pages. _This Room and Everything In It?_ Weird title. Sure, that would suffice. 

“And how’d you pick that one, exactly?” Sylvain asked, sounding weirdly strangled. 

“Chance,” he lied. Sylvain nodded. “Uh _ huh. _Sex through the lens of poetry, yeah?” 

Felix did a double take as he skimmed the poem. He hadn’t actually read it, just made a beeline for the most dog-eared page, figuring Sylvain’s favorite had to be at least _ okay. _ But he hadn’t expected it to be this, well, raunchy.

“That might be my favorite poem in the anthology,” said Sylvain, oblivious to Felix’s mental turmoil. “Li-Young Lee. ‘This Room and Everything in It.’ Read it for me?”

“I can’t,” growled Felix, suddenly grateful for the dim lighting of the library.

Sylvain looked at him, brow arched. “But… you picked it.” 

Felix briefly considered his options. He sighed. How long was this? Fifteen lines, twenty? Fine. He’d get through it. 

_Lie still now_  
_ while I prepare for my future,_  
_ certain hard days ahead,  
when I’ll need what I know so clearly this moment._

_I am making use_  
_ of the one thing I learned_  
_ of all the things my father tried to teach me:  
the art of memory._

_I am letting this room_  
_ and everything in it_  
_ stand for my ideas about love  
and its difficulties._

This was getting harder to read. And, he wanted to mention, Rodrigue hadn’t taught him shit. But Sylvain looked as if he was relishing the experience, and his brain seemed to relish that, the thought of pleasing that… idiot. That thought kept him going even as his brain buzzed and rattled around his skull. 

“I’ll let your love-cries, those spacious notes of a moment ago, stand for distance. Your scent, that scent of spice and a wound, I’ll let stand for mystery.”

Spice and a wound. It was as if this man, this Lee, were reading his private, innermost thoughts. How did he know? Was his desire so universal? 

“My body is estrangement. This desire, perfection. Your closed eyes my extinction. Now I’ve forgotten my idea. The book on the windowsill, riffled by wind…”

His voice swelled and tapered with the words, foam and fervor crashing against the shores of the library walls, the room_ they _ were in and everything there. Sylvain was watching him raptly, boring holes with his stare while biting the back of his hand in concentration. The intensity on his face, so uncharacteristic of Sylvain, shot straight to Felix’s spine. 

He swallowed. He’d come this far. Now to finish.

_useless, useless . . ._  
_ your cries are song, my body’s not me . . ._  
_ no good . . . my idea_  
_ has evaporated . . . your hair is time, your thighs are song . . ._  
_ it had something to do_  
_ with death . . . it had something  
to do with love._

A silence fell between them. In that silence Felix thought of death, of love, of the red-headed dumbass sitting before him.

All he had to do was wait, and soon, predictably, Sylvain fractured it. “It’s funny… out of all the poems in my anthology, I’d never imagined you’d choose _ that _ one,” he said, leaning back, hands behind his head. Ease in human form. Unfair. “Pretty good, huh? One of my faves. Of course there are some parts I don’t _ love _ \-- hair as time and thighs as song, well, that I’m not too sure of -- but the rest rings so _ true! _ To me, anyway. Spacious notes, yeah, spice and wounds...” 

He was grateful, for once, for Sylvain’s excited babbling, smoothing over their edges and flowing through the cramped corner of the library they shared; he needed that voice to walk him back from the precipice of want, of desire. He still couldn’t think straight. Or rather he could think one thing: every poem would be interesting if it were so applicable to Sylvain. 

Love: Sylvain dragging him through each and every assignment at one in the morning, long past office hours, in this deserted library when he’d rather be doing anything else, surely. Difficulties: Sylvain luminous and charming, who drew others to him like moths to a flame, who somehow had all the time in the world for him and yet no time at all. 

As rooms and memory went, this one was not so hard to commit. Now he took inventory. Three large candles between him and Sylvain, casting their faces in pools of flickering light; Sylvain’s legs kicked up on a mahogany table that had seen _ much _ better days, thoroughly scuffed because thoughtless destruction was just what Sylvain did. The volumes piled up around them, the classic library scent of ink-on-page that Sylvain loved so much and Felix found grudgingly pleasant. He folded these memories, one by one, into the box of his heart and hoped to keep them safe through hard days. 

Sylvain was yawning now, rubbing sleep from his eyes, looking at him with an absent-minded warmth and curiosity. This, perhaps, was the most precious memory of all, one he would carefully crease and place right against his heart. 

“Hey, Felix, you’re, uh, staring at me,” said Sylvain. “Pretty intently, I might add.”

“Oh,” said Felix. So he was. Whoops. 

“And you... looked like you were going to say something?”

“I’ve… forgotten,” said Felix, which he had. 

“Forgotten your idea, eh?” said Sylvain. _ “_Heh. _Your closed eyes my extinction…_” 

“What?” he said blankly. 

“Nothing! Nothing at all,” said Sylvain, leaping up from their table like a nimble cat. “Let’s go back, Felix. I’m starving.” 

Sylvain took his hand with a strength that always surprised him and pulled him to his feet. As a grip it was warm and reassuring, and for the second time this evening Felix felt his cheeks tingle and thanked the goddess the library was so damn dark. This hand, too, calloused and ridged, he would commit to memory -- when the time came. But for now… 

“Whatever,” he said, and Sylvain laughed.

**Author's Note:**

> -sylvain’s starving... for TOUCH!!! shoutout to AP Sword  
-"while u were eating roasted pheasant with berry sauce six times a day,,, i mastered the blockchain"  
-i wanted to major in lit in college but didn’t cause i’m a sellout, what better salvation than vicariously livin thru my BOYS  
\- epilogue: felix reads marianne moore’s “poetry” and realizes w horror it captures his feelings perfectly   
\- i think theres a legitimate argument that sylvain would be the fucko student and felix the tryhard tutor BUT i feel sylvain would be much more naturally comfortable w the abstraction of modern poetry plus genuinely nice as a TA! and felix would just be like [surly] this is bullshit can i get back to studying the Blade
> 
>   
n finally the REFERENCED POEMS please read please read:   
\- li-young lee, [this room and everything in it](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43328/this-room-and-everything-in-it)  
-emily dickinson, [a narrow fellow in the grass](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49909/a-narrow-fellow-in-the-grass-1096)  
-yeats, [an irish airman foresees his death](https://poets.org/poem/irish-airman-foresees-his-death)  
-marianne moore, [poetry](https://poets.org/poem/poetry)
> 
> SORRY FOR ALL THE NOTES BYE


End file.
